Top User Research Platforms 2025

User interviews have always been one of the most trusted and powerful UX research methods. They give you something beyond dashboards or written surveys: real, in-depth conversations and context.

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But they’ve historically come with a cost – time, coordination, and a heavy lift to review recordings and turn videos into insights. Sometimes insights get buried. Recordings sit unused and research becomes challenging to revisit.

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In our recent webinar, we explored how that’s changing and how you can reduce the heavy lift of interview review, while building a research repository. 

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What is a research repository?

A research repository is a centralized system for storing, analyzing, and reusing research data, especially qualitative data like user interviews. It helps teams answer questions like what users said, what patterns emerged, and how past research can inform future decisions.
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For interviews, this means:

• Storing recordings and transcripts
• Organizing insights and themes
• Making research searchable
• Enabling teams to revisit past findings
• Supporting continuous discovery
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Optimal Interviews brings this to life by automatically capturing recordings, generating transcripts, structuring insights from the start, and making everything searchable so teams can easily revisit, build on, and continuously learn from their research.
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So what did we learn? Here are some key takeaways from this webinar, plus answers to the most common questions we heard.
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1. The biggest bottleneck isn’t conducting interviews. It’s everything surrounding it.

Running interviews isn’t just about talking to users. It’s everything before and after:

• Recruiting participants
• Coordinating calendars
• Managing reschedules and no-shows
• Setting up emails and reminders
• Transcribing, organizing, and synthesizing findings
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That overhead adds up quickly. There’s opportunity in automating these workflows and removing the friction around them. Optimal Interviews solves this by:
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• Creating a central calendar
• Emailing participants with confirmations and session reminders
• Automatically capturing recordings
• Generating transcripts
• Uploading and generating summaries and insights
• Structuring insights from the start
• Allowing you to explore instantly with AI Chat
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2. Speed matters more than ever (and it’s finally achievable)

Research isn’t slowing down. Product cycles are getting faster, and teams expect insights just as quickly.

What stood out most:

• Interviews can now go from recording → transcript → insights in minutes
• Teams can share highlight reels, clips and findings almost immediately
• Analysis can start while context is still fresh
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One team told us that a few years ago it took them three weeks to analyze user interviews for an initiative. When they replicated the same study in Optimal Interviews, they were able to generate usable insights in about five minutes.
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That shift from lagging insight to near real-time understanding is where the real impact lies.

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3. Scheduling should feel effortless

Interview scheduling sounds simple, but it’s often where things break down.
You can use Optimal Interviews to ensure:
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• Availability blocks with buffers
• Controlled rescheduling and cancellations
• Video conferencing integrations
• Support for collaborators
• Built-in, secure participant communication & messaging (coming soon)
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When done right, scheduling fades into the background so teams can focus on conversations, not coordination.
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4. AI is reshaping analysis but humans stay in control

AI is already proving its value in the analysis phase:

• Automatic transcription across multiple languages
• Theme and insight extraction across interviews
• Highlight reels and supporting evidence
• Natural language queries over your research
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But one point came through clearly: AI accelerates analysis but it doesn’t replace human judgment and sensitivity.
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Researchers still play a critical role in validating insights, interpreting nuance, and deciding what matters for the business. Think of AI as getting you to 80% faster, while you own the final 20%.

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5. The real unlock is continuous, reusable research

Here’s what you can achieve with Optimal Interviews:

• You can ask questions of past interviews using natural language
• Create new custom themes or topics on demand for AI to add new insights into
• Re-analyze old research with fresh context
• Add new interviews to your existing Optimal Interviews study and refresh the insights
• Identify gaps and spin up new studies faster
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This turns research from static storage into something dynamic, something you can continuously mine and build on.
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FAQs from the Webinar

Does the platform synthesize insights or just aggregate data?

Both. You can extract insights from individual interviews, but the real value often comes from patterns across multiple sessions. Aggregation helps surface stronger, more reliable themes, while still preserving standout moments from single participants.
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How is sensitive data handled?

Privacy is a core focus and consideration with Optimal Interviews. Some of the key protections include automatic redaction of personally identifiable information (PII) and enterprise-grade AI infrastructure with strict data isolation. We're also looking to expand Optimal Interviews anonymized scheduling and communication and manual redaction controls before analysis.
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What if I can’t connect my video conferencing tools?

Integrations are available for Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom. 

You can still run everything without integrations:

• Set availability without integrations
• Add conferencing links yourself
• Manage sessions independently
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Integrations are helpful but not required.
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Can I search across multiple studies?

Today, teams often bring relevant interviews into one project for analysis. Looking ahead, the goal is broader. Optimal’s looking into how the platform can search and query across all research, use AI chat to explore insights across studies, and surface insights at a Workspace level.
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Can I query transcripts or AI summaries?

Yes. You can search transcripts directly and use AI-powered chat to explore themes, generate summaries, or even turn findings into shareable outputs like Slack posts or reports.

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Final thought

Interviews aren’t new. But the way we run them and what we can get out of them is changing fast.

By removing operational overhead and reducing time to insight, teams can talk to users more often, share insights faster, and build a research repository that becomes part of everyday product decision-making.
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If you want to experience the full walkthrough, demo, and Q&A from the session, we encourage you to watch the full webinar.
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👉 You can watch the full training webinar here.

All the way back in 2014, the web passed a pretty significant milestone: 1 billion websites. Of course, fewer than 200 million of these are actually active as of 2019, but there’s an important underlying point. People love to create. If the current digital age that we live in has taught us anything, it’s that it’s never been as easy to get information and ideas out into the world.

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Understandably, this ability has been used – and often misused. Overloaded, convoluted websites are par for the course, with a common tactic for website renewal being to simply update them with a new coat of paint while ignoring the swirling pile of outdated and poorly organized content below.

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So what are you supposed to do when trying to address this problem on your own website or digital project? Well, there’s a fairly robust technique called top tasks management. Here, we’ll go over exactly what it is and how you can use it.

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Getting to grips with top tasks

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Ideally, all websites would be given regular, comprehensive reviews. Old content could be revisited and analyzed to see whether it’s still actually serving a purpose. If not, it could be reworked or just removed entirely. Based on research, content creators could add new content to address user needs. Of course, this is just the ideal. The reality is that there’s never really enough time or resource to manage the growing mass of digital content in this way. The solution is to hone in on what your users actually use your website for and tailor the experience accordingly by looking at top tasks.

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What are top tasks? They're basically a small set of tasks (typically around 5, but up to 10 is OK too) that are most important to your users. The thinking goes that if you get these core tasks right, your website will be serving the majority of your users and you’ll be more likely to retain them. Ignore top tasks (and any sort of task analysis), and you’ll likely find users leaving your website to find something else that better fits their needs.

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The counter to top tasks is tiny tasks. These are everything on a website that’s not all that important for the people actually using it. Commonly, tiny tasks are driven more by the organization’s needs than those of the users. Typically, the more important a task is to a user, the less information there is to support it. On the other hand, the less important a task is to a user, the more information there is. Tiny tasks stem very much from ‘organization first’ thinking, wherein user needs are placed lower on the list of considerations.
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According to Jerry McGovern (who penned an excellent write-up of top tasks on A List Apart), the top tasks model says “Focus on what really matters (the top tasks) and defocus on what matters less (the tiny tasks).”

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How to identify top tasks

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Figuring out your top tasks is an important step in clearing away the fog and identifying what actually matters to your users. We’ll call this stage of the process task discovery, and these are the steps:

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1. Gather: Work with your organization to gather a list of all customer tasks
2. Refine: Take this list of tasks to a smaller group of stakeholders and work it down into a shortlist
3. User feedback: Go out to your users and get a representative sample to vote on them
4. Finalise: Assemble a table of tasks with the one with the highest number of votes at the top and the lowest number of votes at the bottom

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We’ll go into detail on the above steps, explaining the best way of handling each one. Keep in mind that this process isn’t something you’ll be able to complete in a week – it’s more likely a 6 to 8-week project, depending on the size of your website, how large your user base is and the receptiveness of your organization to help out.

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Step 1: Gather – Figure out the long list of tasks

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The first part of the task process is to get out into the wider organization and discover what your users are actually trying to accomplish on your website or by using your products. It’s all about getting into the minds of your users – trying to see the world through their eyes, effectively.

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If you’re struggling to think of places where you might find customer tasks, here are some of the best sources:

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• Analytics: Take a deep dive into the analytics of your website or product to find out how people are using them. For websites, you’ll want to look at pages with high traffic and common downloads or interactions. The same applies to products – although the data you have access to will depend on the analytics systems in place.
• Customer support teams: Your own internal support teams can be a great source of user tasks. Support teams commonly spend all day speaking to users, and as a result, are able to build up a cohesive understanding of the types of tasks users commonly attempt.
• Sales teams: Similarly, sales teams are another good source of task data. Sales teams typically deal with people before they become your users, but a part of their job is to understand the problems they’re trying to solve and how your website or product can help.
• Direct customer feedback: Check for surveys your organization has run in the past to see whether any task data already exists.
• Social media: Head to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to see what people are talking about with regards to your industry. What tasks are being mentioned?

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It’s important to note that you need to cast a wide net when gathering task data. You can’t just rely on analytics data. Why? Well, downloads and page visits only reflect what you have, but not what your users might actually be searching for.

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As for search, Jerry McGovern explains why it doesn’t actually tell the entire story: “When we worked on the BBC intranet, we found they had a feature called “Top Searches” on their homepage. The problem was that once they published the top searches list, these terms no longer needed to be searched for, so in time a new list of top searches emerged! Similarly, top tasks tend to get bookmarked, so they don’t show up as much in search. And the better the navigation, the more likely the site search is to reflect tiny tasks.”

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At the end of the initial task-gathering stage you should be left with around 300 to 500 tasks. Of course, this can scale up or down depending on the size of the website or product.

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Step 2: Refine – Create your shortlist

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Now that you’ve got your long list of tasks, it’s time to trim them back until you’ve got a shortlist of 100 or less. Keep in mind that working through your long list of tasks is going to take some time, so plan for this process to take at least 4 weeks (but likely more).

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It’s important to involve stakeholders from across the organization during the shortlist process. Bring in people from support, sales, product, marketing and leadership areas of the organization. In addition to helping you to create a more concise and usable list, the shortlist process helps your stakeholders to think about areas of overlap and where they may need to work together.

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When working your list down to something more usable, try and consolidate and simplify. Stay away from product names as well as internal organization and industry jargon. With your tasks, you essentially want to focus on the underlying thing that a user is trying to do. If you were focusing on tasks for a bank, opt for “Transactions” instead of “Digital mobile payments”. Similarly, bring together tasks where possible. “Customer support”, “Help and support” and “Support center” can all be merged.

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At a very technical level, it also helps to avoid lengthy tasks. Stick to around 7 to 8 words and try and avoid verbs, using them only when there’s really no other option. You’ll find that your task list becomes quick to navigate when tasks begin with “look”, “find” and “get”. Finally, stay away from specific audiences and demographics. You want to keep your tasks universal.

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Step 3: User feedback – Get users to vote

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With your shortlist created, it’s time to take it to your users. Using a survey tool like Optimal's Surveys, add in each one of your shortlisted tasks and have users rank 5 tasks on a scale from 1 to 5, with 5 being the most important and 1 being the least important.

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If you’re thinking that your users will never take the time to work through such a long list, consider that the very length of the list means they’ll seek out the tasks that matter to them and ignore the ones that don’t.

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Step 4: Finalize – Analyze your results

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Now for the task analysis side of the project. What you want at the end of the user survey end of the project is a league table of entire shortlist of tasks. We’re going to use the example from Cisco’s top tasks project, which has been documented over at A List Apart by Gerry McGovern (who actually ran the project). The entire article is worth a read as it covers the process of running a top task project for a large organization.

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Here’s what a league table of the top 20 tasks looks like from Cisco:

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Here’s the breakdown of the vote for Cisco’s tasks:

• 3 tasks got the first 25 percent of the vote
• 6 tasks got 25-50 percent of the vote
• 14 tasks got 50-75 percent of the vote
• 44 tasks got 75-100 percent of the vote

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While the pattern may seem surprising, it’s actually not unusual. As Jerry explains: “We have done this process over 400 times and the same patterns emerge every single time.”

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Final thoughts

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Focusing on top tasks management is really a practice that needs to be conducted on a semi-regular basis. The approach benefits organizations in a multitude of ways, bringing different teams and people together to figure out how to best address why your users are coming to your website and what they actually need from you.

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As we explained at the beginning of this article, top tasks is really about clearing away the fog and understanding on what really matters. Instead of spreading yourself thin and focusing on a host of tiny tasks, hone in on those top tasks that actually matter to your users.

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Understanding how to improve your website

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The top tasks approach is an effective way of giving you a clear idea of what you should be focusing on when designing or redesigning your website, but this should really just be one aspect of the work you do.

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Utilizing a host of other UX research methods can give you a much more comprehensive idea of what’s working and what’s not. With card sorting, for example, you can learn how your users think the content on your website should be arranged. Then, with this data in hand, you can use tree testing to assemble draft structures of your website and test how people navigate their way through it. You can keep iterating on these structures to ensure you’ve created the most user-friendly navigation.
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Take a look at our 101 guides to learn more about card sorting and tree testing, as well as the other user research methods you can use to make solid improvements to your website. If you’d rather just start putting methods into practice using user research tools, take our UX platform for a spin for free here.

User research and design doesn’t fail because teams don’t care – it fails because there’s rarely time to explore every option. When deadlines pile up, most teams default to the same familiar research patterns and miss opportunities to get more value from the tools they already have.

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We’ve brought together practical, real-world ways to use Optimal – from tree testing and first-click testing to card sorting, surveys, prototype testing, and interviews. Some of these use cases are obvious, but many aren’t. All of them are designed to help teams move faster, reduce risk, and turn user insights into decisions stakeholders trust.

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We’ve focused on quick wins and flexible examples you can adapt to your own context – whether you’re benchmarking navigation, validating early designs, improving conversion flows, prioritizing work, or proving the ROI of UX. You don’t need more tools or more processes. You just need smarter ways to use what you already have.

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Let’s get into it.

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Practical ways to use Optimal for user research and UX design

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#1 Benchmark your information architecture (IA)

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Without a baseline for your navigation or information architecture (IA), you can’t easily tell if any changes you make have a positive effect. If you haven’t done so, benchmark your existing website on tree testing now. Upload your site structure and get results the same day. Now you’ll have IA scores to beat each month. Easy.

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#2 Find out precisely where people get lost

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Watch video recordings of real people interacting with your sites with live site testing. Combine this with surveys and user interviews to understand where users struggled. You can also use the tree testing pietree to find out exactly where people are getting lost in your website structure and where they go instead.

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#3 Start with one screenshot

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If you’re just not sure where to begin then take a screenshot of your homepage, or any page that you think might have some issues and get going with first-click testing. Write up a string of things that people might want to do when they find themselves on this page and use these as your tasks. Surprise all your colleagues with a maddening heatmap or video recordings showing where people actually clicked in response to your tasks or where they struggle. Now you’ll have a better idea of which area of your site to focus on for your next step.

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#4 Test live sites during discovery

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You can run live site testing as part of your discovery phase to baseline your live experiences and see how well your current site supports real user goals. Test competitors' sites to see how you stack up. You’ll quickly uncover opportunities to differentiate your site, all before a single wireframe is drawn. All that's required is a URL and then you're set to go. No code needed.

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#5 A/B test your site structure

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Tree testing is great for testing more than one content structure. It’s easy to run two separate tree testing studies, even more than two. It’ll help you decide which structure you and your team should run with, and it won’t take you long to set them up.

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#6 Optimize sign-up flows

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Discover how easy (or not) it is for users to navigate your sign up experience to ensure it works exactly as intended. Create a live site or prototype test to identify any confusion or points of friction. You could also use this test to understand users' first impressions of your home or landing page. Where do they click first and what information is valuable to them?

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#7 Make collaborative design decisions‍

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Use surveys, first-click tests, and card sorting to get your team involved and let their feedback feed your designs: logos, icons, banners, images, the list goes on... For example, by creating a closed image sort with categories, your team can group designs based on their preferences, you can get some quick feedback to help you figure out where you should focus your efforts.

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#8 Do your (market) research

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Get a better sense of your users and customers’ motivations with surveys and user interviews. You can also find out what people actually want to see on your website with a card sort, by conducting an image sort of potential products. By providing categories like ‘I would buy this’, ‘I wouldn’t buy this’ to indicate their preferences for each item, you can figure out what types of products appeal to your customers.

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#9 Customer satisfaction surveys with surveys and interviews

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The thoughts and feelings of your users are always important. A simple survey or user interview can help you take a deeper look at your checkout process, a recently launched product or service, or even the packaging your product arrives in. Your options are endless.

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#10 Start testing prototypes

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Companies that incorporate prototype testing in their design process can reduce development costs by 33%. Use prototype testing to ensure your designs hit the mark before you invest too heavily in the build. Build your own prototype with images in Optimal or import a Figma file. You can even test AI-generated prototypes from tools like Lovable or Magic Patterns by dropping the URL into live site testing.

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#11 Crowdsource content ideas

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Whether you’re running a blog or a UX conference, surveys can help you generate content ideas and understand any knowledge gaps that might be out there. Figure out what your users and attendees like to read on your blog, or what they want to hear about at your event, and let this feed into what you offer.

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#12 Evaluate user flows

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Sometimes a change in your product or service means you have to change how it’s presented to your existing customers.  Ensure your customers understand the changes to your product or service with prototype and live site testing. Identify issues with user flow, content, or layout that may confuse them. Discover which options they’re most likely to choose with the updates. Uncover what truly matters to your customers.

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#13 Quantify the return on investment of UX

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Some people, including UX Agony Aunt, define return on UX as time saved, money made, and people engaged. By attaching a value to the time spent completing tasks, or to successful completion of tasks, you can approximate an ROI or at least illustrate the difference between two options.

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#14 Convince your stakeholders with highlight reels

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User interviews are teeming with insights but can be time and resource intensive to analyze without automation. Use Optimal Interviews tool to capture key moments, reactions, and pain points with automated highlight reels and clips. These are perfect for storytelling, stakeholder buy-in, and keeping teams connected to who they’re building for.

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#15 Prioritize upcoming work 

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Survey your organization to build a list of ideas for upcoming work. Understand your audience’s priorities with card sorting to inform your feature development. Categorize your upcoming work ideas to decide collectively what’s best to take on next. Great for clarifying what the team considers the most valuable or pressing work to be done.

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#16 Reduce content on landing pages to what people access regularly

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Before you run an open card sort to generate new category ideas, you can run a closed card sort to find out if you have any redundant content. Say you wanted to simplify the homepage of your intranet. You can ask participants to sort cards (containing homepage links) based on how often they use them. You could compare this card sort data with analytics from your intranet and see if people’s actual behavior and perception are well aligned.

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#17 Create tests to fit in your onboarding process

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Onboarding new customers is crucial to keeping them engaged with your product, especially if it involves your users learning how to use it. You can set up a quick study to help your users stay on track with onboarding. For example, say your company provided online email marketing software. You can set up a first-click testing study using a photo of your app, with a task asking your participants where they’d click to see the open rates for a particular email that went out.

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#18 Input your learnings and observations from a UX conference with qualitative insights

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If you're lucky enough to attend a UX conference, you can now share the experience with your colleagues. You can easily jot down ideas, quotes and key takeaways in a Qualitative Insights project and keep your notes organized by using a new session for each presenter Bonus, if you’re part of a team, they can watch the live feed rolling into Qualitative Insights!

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#19 Multivariate testing

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Tree testing and first-click testing allow you to compare multiple versions of content structures, designs, or flows. You can also compare how users engage with different live websites in one study. This helps decide the best-performing option without guessing.

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#20 Do some sociological research

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Using card sorting for sociological research is a great way to deepen your understanding of how different groups may categorize information. For example, by looking at how young people group popular social media platforms, you can understand the relationships between them, and identify where your product may fit in the mix. Then, follow up with surveys or moderated interviews for deeper insights. 

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#21 Test your FAQs page with new users

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Your support and knowledge base within your website can be just as important as any other core action on your website. If your support site is lacking in navigation and UX, this will no doubt increase support tickets and resources. Make sure your online support section is up to scratch. Here’s an article on how to do it quickly.

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#22 Establish which tags or filters people consider to be the most important

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Create a card sort with your search filters or tags as labels, and have participants rank them according to how important they consider them to be. Analytics can tell you half of the story (where people actually click), so the card sort can give another side: a better idea of what people actually think or want. Follow up with surveys or interviews to confirm insights.

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#23 Figure out if your icons need labels

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‍Figure out if your icons are doing their job by testing whether your users are understanding them as intended. Uploading icons you currently use, or plan to use in your interface to first-click testing, and ask your users to identify their meaning by making use of post-task questions.

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#24 Get straight to the aha! moments

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Optimal Interviews gives you automated insights but you can also engage with AI Chat to dive deeper. Ask AI specific questions about a feature or process or request quotes or examples. Then, get highlight reels and clips to match.

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#25 Improve website conversions

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Make the marketing team’s day by doing a fast improvement on some core conversions on your website. Now, there are loads of ways to improve conversions for a check out cart or signup form, but using first-click testing to test out ideas before you start going live A/B test can take mere minutes and give your B version a confidence boost. For deeper insights, try a live site test. 

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#26 Test your mobile experience or web app

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As more and more people are using their smartphones for apps and to browse sites, you need to ensure its design gives your users a great experience. Test your mobile site to ensure people aren’t getting lost in the mobile version of your site. If you haven’t got a mobile-friendly design yet, now’s the time to start designing it!

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#27 Get automated transcripts

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Have a number of interviews you need to transcribe quickly? Upload up to 20 interviews at once in Optimal Interviews and get automated transcripts, so you can spend less time on admin and more time digging into insights.

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#28 Reduce the bounce rates of certain sections of your website‍

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People jumping off your website and not continuing their experience is something (depending on the landing page) everyone tries to improve. The metric ‘time on site’ and ‘average page views’ is a metric that shows the value your whole website has to offer. Again, there are many different ways to do this, but one big reason for people jumping off the website is not being able to find what they’re looking for. Use prototype testing or live site testing to watch users in action and understand where things break down.

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#29 Test your website in different countries‍

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No, you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to go to all these countries to test, although that’d be pretty sweet. You can remotely research participants from all over the world, using our integrated recruitment panel. Start seeing how different cultures, languages, and countries interact with your website. 

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#30 Preference test

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Whether you’re coming up with a new logo design, headline, featured image, or anything, you can preference test it with first-click testing. Create an image that shows the two designs side by side and upload it to first-click testing. From there, you can ask people to click whichever one they prefer!  If you want to track multiple clicks per task or watch recordings, use prototype testing instead.

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#31 Test visual hierarchy with first-click testing

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Use first-click testing to understand which elements draw users' attention first on your page. Upload your design and ask participants to click on the most important element, or what catches their eye first. The resulting heatmap will show you if your visual hierarchy is working as intended - are users clicking where you expect them to? This technique helps validate design decisions about sizing, color, positioning, and contrast without needing to build the actual page.

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#32 Tame your blog or knowledge base

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Get the tags and categories in your blog under control to make life easier for your readers. Set up a card sort and use all your tags and categories as card labels. Either use your existing ones or test a fresh set of new tags and categories.

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#33 Use AI Chat for stakeholder-ready outputs

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Use AI-powered chat to instantly reformat interview insights and fast-track deliverables for different audiences. Simply specify the details of the deliverable you would like. For example: “Turn this into a 3-sentence Slack summary (no citations).” or “Rewrite this as an exec-ready insight with a clear recommendation.”

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‍#34 Validate the designs in your head

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As designers, you’ve probably got umpteen designs floating around in your head at any one time. But which of these are really worth pursuing? Figure this out by using Optimal to test out wireframes of new designs before putting any more work into them.

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#35 Optimize the support escalation flow

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Understand how users navigate help resources, report issues, and conceptualize support categories, especially when they need to locate assistance quickly in time-sensitive situations.

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#36 Improve your search engine optimization (SEO) with tree testing

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Yes, a good IA improves your SEO. Tree testing helps you understand how people navigate throughout your site. It also helps search engines better understand and index your content, making it more discoverable and relevant in search results. Make sure people can easily find what they’re looking for, and you’ll start to see improvement in your search engine ranking.

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#37 Feature prioritization and get some help for your roadmap

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Find out what people think are the most important next steps for your team. Set up a survey or card sort and ask people to categorize items and rank them in descending order of importance or impact on their work. This can also help you gauge their thoughts on potential new features for your site, and for bonus points compare team responses with customer responses.

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#38 Define your brand tone of voice

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Use a card sort to understand how people perceive your brand, so you can shape or refine your brand personality, tone of voice, and style guidelines. Run this with stakeholders or your audience to uncover current perceptions and where they’d like your brand to go next.

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#39 Run an Easter egg hunt using the correct areas in first-click testing

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Liven up the workday by creating a fun Easter egg hunt in first-click testing. Simply upload a photo (like those really hard “spot the X” photos), set the correct area of your target, then send out your study with participant identifiers enabled. You can also send these out as competitions and have closing rules based on time, number of participants, or both.

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#40 Test your home button

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Would an icon or text link work better for navigating to your home page? Before you go ahead and make changes to your site, you can find out by setting up a first-click testing test.

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#41 Improve team structure and clarity role expectations

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Run a card sort, survey, or internal interviews to understand how responsibilities are perceived across different roles. Work with team leaders and managers to clarify role definitions, reporting lines, and decision-making authority. This helps uncover overlapping responsibilities and opportunities to streamline management and support team workflows.

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#42 ‘Buy now’ button shopping cart visibility‍

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If you’re running an e-commerce site, ease of use and a great user experience are crucial. To see if your shopping cart and checkout processes are as good as they can be, look into running a live site, prototype or first-click test.

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#43 Website periodic health checks

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Raise the visibility of good IA by running periodic IA health checks using tree testing and reporting the results. Proactively identifying structural issues early, and backing decisions with clear metrics, helps drive alignment and build confidence across stakeholders.

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‍#44 Use heatmaps to get the first impressions of designs

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Heatmaps in our first-click testing tool are a great way of getting first impressions of any design. You can see where people clicked (correctly and incorrectly), giving you insights on what works and doesn’t work with your designs. Because it’s so fast to test, you can iterate until your designs start singing.

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#45 Focus groups with interviews

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Thinking of launching a new product, app or website, or seeking opinions on an existing one? Remote focus groups can provide you with a lot of candid information that may help get your project off the ground. They’re also dangerous because they’re susceptible to groupthink, design by committee, and tunnel vision. Use with caution, but if you do then upload your recordings to Interviews for automated insights! Find patterns across sessions and use AI Chat to dig deeper. Pay attention to emotional triggers.

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#46 Gather opinions with surveys

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Whether you want the opinions of your users or from members of your team, you can set up a quick and simple survey. It’s super useful for getting opinions on new ideas (consider it almost like a mini-focus group), or even for brainstorming with teammates.

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#47 Prioritise content

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Use a card sort to understand what content matters most to people, so you can plan what to write first. Ask participants which information is most useful or which tasks they do most often. You can also run this after a top tasks survey to help shape your long list of content.

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#48 Test a new concept

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Got an idea you want to sanity-check before investing more time? Use surveys, first-click testing, or prototype testing to see if people understand the concept and find it valuable. A quick test now can save a lot of rework later.

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#49 Run an image card sort to organize products into groups

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You can add images to each card that allows you to understand how your participants may organize and label particular items. Very useful if you want to organize some retail products and want to find out how other people would organize them given a visual including shape, color, and other potential context.

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#50 Guerrilla testing with first-click testing

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For really quick first-click testing, take first-click testing on a tablet, mobile device or laptop to a local coffee shop. Ask people standing in line if they’d like to take part in your super quick test in exchange for a cup of joe. Easy!

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#51 Test your search box

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Case study by Viget: “One of the most heavily used features of the website is its keyword search, so we wanted to make absolutely certain that our redesigned search box didn’t make search harder for users to find and use.” Use first-click testing to test different variations. 

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#52 Run a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey

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Optimal surveys give you plenty of question options, but one of the simplest ways to take the pulse of your product is an NPS survey to find out how likely they would recommend your product or brand. Use the out-of-the-box NPS question type question to quickly understand customer sentiment and track it over time.

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#53 Run an empathy test

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Empathy – the ability to understand and share the experience of another person – is central to the design process. An empathy test is another great tool to use in the design phase because it enables you to find out if you are creating the right kind of feelings with your user. Take your design and show it to users. Provide them with a variety of words that could represent the design – for example “minimalistic”, “dynamic”, or “professional” – and ask them to pick out which words which they think are best suited to their experience.

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#54 Compare and test email designs

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Drop your email designs into first-click testing to see which version people prefer and where they click first. Use these insights to refine your layout, hierarchy, and calls to action to improve engagement and conversions.

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#55 Source-specific data with an online survey

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Online survey tools can complement your existing research by sourcing specific information from your participants. For example, if you need to find out more about how your participants use social media, which sites they use, and on which devices, you can do it all through a simple survey questionnaire. Additionally, if you need to identify usage patterns, device preferences or get information on what other products/websites your users are aware of/are using, a questionnaire is the ticket.

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#56 Make sure you get the user's first-click right

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Like most things, read a little, and then it’s all about practice. We’ve found that people who get the first click correct are almost three times as likely to complete a task successfully. Get your first clicks right in tree testing and first-click testing and you’ll start seeing your customers smile.

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#57 Destroy evil attractors in your tree

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Evil attractors are those labels in your IA that attract unjustified clicks across tasks. This usually means the chosen label is ambiguous, or possibly a catch-all phrase like ‘Resources’. Read how to quickly identify evil attractors in the Destinations table of tree test results and how to fix them.

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#58 Ensure accessibility and inclusion

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Check how people with different physical, visual, or cognitive needs move through your content, and spot any areas that might slow them down or cause confusion. Use what you uncover to remove friction and support all users.

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#59 Add moderated card sort results to your card sort‍

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An excellent way of gathering valuable qualitative insights alongside the results of your remote card sorts is to run a moderated version of the sorts with a smaller group of participants. When you can observe and interact with your participants as they complete the sort, you’ll be able to ask questions and learn more about their thought processes and the reasons why they have categorized things in a particular way.

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#60 Test your customers' perceptions of different logo and brand image designs

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Understand how customers perceive your brand by creating a closed card sort. Come up with a list of categories, and ask participants to sort images such as logos, and branded images.

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#61 Run an open image card sort to classify images into groups based on the emotions they elicit

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‍Are these pictures exhilarating, or terrifying? Are they humorous, or offensive? Relaxing, or boring? Productive, or frantic? Happy memories, or a deep sigh?

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#62 Crowd-source the values you want your team/brand/product to represent

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‍Card sorting is a well-established technique in the ‘company values’ realm, and there are some great resources to help you and your team brainstorm the values you represent. These ‘in-person’ brainstorm sessions are great, and you can run a remote closed card sort to support your findings. And if you want feedback from more than a small group of people (if your company has, say, more than 15 staff) you can run a remote closed card sort on its own. Use Microsoft’s Reaction Card Method as card inspiration.

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#63 Test physical and digital experiences together

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Use recorded videos and interviews to observe people interacting with physical products, kiosks, or mobile apps in real-world contexts. Record sessions, capture moments of friction, and bring those insights back into Optimal’s Interviews tool for automated insights.

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#64 HR exercises to determine the motivations of your team

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It’s simple to ask your team about their thoughts, feelings, and motivations with a survey. You can choose to leave participant identifiers blank (so responses are anonymous), or you can ask for a name/email address. As a bonus, you can set up a calendar reminder to send out a new survey in the next quarter. Duplicate the survey and send it out again!

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#65 Designing physical environments

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‍If your company has a physical environment in which your customers visit, you can research new structures using a mixture of tools in Optimal. This especially comes in handy if your customers require certain information within the physical environment in order to make decisions. For example, picture a retail store. Are all the signs clear and communicate the right information? Are people overwhelmed by the physical environment?

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#66 Run an image card sort to organize your library

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Whether it’s a physical library of books, or a digital drive full of ebooks, you can run a card sort to help organize them in a way that makes sense. Will it be by genre, author name, color or topic? Send out the study to your coworkers to get their input! You can also do this at home for your own personal library, and you can include music/CDs/vinyl records and movies!

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#67 Use tree testing to refine an interactive phone menu system

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Similar to how you’d design an IA, you can create a tree test to design an automated phone system. Whether you’re designing from the ground up, or improving your existing system, you will be able to find out if people are getting lost.

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Practical ways to use Optimal for user research (and get value fast)

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And that’s the list. This is not everything you can do with Optimal, but a solid reminder that meaningful user insights don’t have to be slow, heavy, or overcomplicated. Small, well-timed studies can uncover friction, validate decisions, and create momentum across teams.

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Ready to get started?

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• Start your free trial and try one idea today
• Talk to an Optimal expert to tailor a workflow for your team
• Explore how other teams use Optimal to scale research across organizations

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Have a creative use case we missed? Let us know, we’re always learning from the ways our customers push research further, faster, and smarter.

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